Of time or distance or trouble,
Insists on its right to be there.

A chance had brought us together;
Our talk was of matters-of-course;
We were nothing, one to the other,
But a short half-hour's resource.

We spoke of French acting and actors,
And their easy, natural way:
Of the weather, for it was raining
As we drove home from the play.

We debated the social nothings

We bore ourselves so to discuss; The thunderous rumors of battle

Were silent the while for us.

Arrived at her door, we left her

With a drippingly hurried adieu, And our wheels went crunching the gravel Of the oak-darkened avenue.

As we drove away through the shadow,
The candle she held in the door
From rain-varnished tree-trunk to tree-

trunk

Flashed fainter, and flashed no more;

Flashed fainter, then wholly faded Before we had passed the wood; But the light of the face behind it Went with me and stayed for good.

The vision of scarce a moment,

And hardly marked at the time, It comes unbidden to haunt me, Like a scrap of ballad-rhyme.

Had she beauty? Well, not what they call

80;

You may find a thousand as fair;
And yet there 's her face in my memory
With no special claim to be there.

As I sit sometimes in the twilight,
And call back to life in the coals
Old faces and hopes and fancies
Long buried, (good rest to their souls!)

Her face shines out in the embers;
I see her holding the light,
And hear the crunch of the gravel

And the sweep of the rain that night.

'T is a face that can never grow older,

That never can part with its gleam, 'T is a gracious possession forever, For is it not all a dream?

TO H. W. L.

ON HIS BIRTHDAY, 27TH FEBRUARY, 1867

"ELMWOOD, February 27, 1867.

"MY DEAR LONGFELLOW,-On looking back, I find that our personal intercourse is now of nearly thirty years' date. It began on your part in a note acknowledging my Class Poem much more kindly than it deserved. Since then it has ripened into friendship, and there has never been a jar between us. If there had been, it would certainly have been my fault and not yours. Friendship is called the wine of life, and there certainly is a stimulus in it that warms and inspires as we grow older. Ours should have some body to have kept so long.

I planned you a little surprise in the Advertiser for your birthday breakfast. I hope my nosegay did not spoil the flavor of your coffee. It is a hard thing to make one that will wholly please, for some flowers will not bear to be handled without wilting, and the kind I have tried to make a pretty bunch of is of that variety. But let me hope the best from your kindness, if not from their color or perfume.

"In case they should please you (and because there was one misprint in the Advertiser, and two phrases which I have now made more to. my mind), I have copied them that you might have them in my own handwriting. In print, you see, I have omitted the tell-tale ciphers not that there was anything to regret in them, for we have a proverbial phrase 'like sixty' which implies not only unabated but extraordinary vigor.

"Wishing you as many happy returns as a wise man should desire, I remain always affectionately yours, J. R. L." Letters I. 378, 379.

I NEED not praise the sweetness of his song, Where limpid verse to limpid verse

succeeds

Smooth as our Charles, when, fearing lest he wrong

The new moon's mirrored skiff, he slides along,

Full without noise, and whispers in his reeds.

with sun,

THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY

"While I was most unwell," Lowell wrote to a friend, September 21, 1875, "I could not find any reading that would seclude me from myself till one day I bethought me of Calderon. I took down a volume of his plays, and in half an hour was completely absorbed. He is surely one of the most marvellous of poets. I have recorded my debt to him in a poem, The Nightingale in the Study."

catbird calls to me,
"COME forth!" my
"And hear me sing a cavatina
That, in this old familar tree,
Shall hang a garden of Alcina.

"These buttercups shall brim with wine
Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic;
May not New England be divine?
My ode to ripening summer classic?

"Or, if to me you will not hark,

By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing
Till all the alder-coverts dark
Seem sunshine-dappled with his sing-
ing.

"Come out beneath the unmastered sky,
With its emancipating spaces,
And learn to sing as well as I,

Without premeditated graces.

"What boot your many-volumed gains, Those withered leaves forever turning, To win, at best, for all your pains,

A nature mummy-wrapt in learning?

"The leaves wherein true wisdom lies

On living trees the sun are drinking; Those white clouds, drowsing through the skies,

Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

"Come out!' with me the oriole cries,
Escape the demon that pursues you!
And, hark, the cuckoo weatherwise,
Still hiding farther onward, wooes you."

"Alas, dear friend, that, all my days, Hast poured from that syringa thicket The quaintly discontinuous lays

To which I hold a season-ticket,

"A season-ticket cheaply bought

With a dessert of pilfered berries, And who so oft my soul hast caught With morn and evening voluntaries,

"Deem me not faithless, if all day
Among my dusty books I linger,
No pipe, like thee, for June to play
With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.

"A bird is singing in my brain

And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies,

Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain
Fed with the sap of old romances.

"I ask no ampler skies than those

His magic music rears above me, No falser friends, no truer foes,

And does not Doña Clara love me?

"Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars, A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing, Then silence deep with breathless stars, And overhead a white hand flashing.

"O music of all moods and climes,

Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly, Where still, between the Christian chimes, The Moorish cymbal tinkles faintly!

"O life borne lightly in the hand,

For friend or foe with grace Castilian !

O valley safe in Fancy's land,

Not tramped to mud yet by the million !

"Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale

To his, my singer of all weathers, My Calderon, my nightingale,

My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.

“Ah, friend, these singers dead so long,
And still, God knows, in purgatory,
Give its best sweetness to all song,
To Nature's self her better glory."

IN THE TWILIGHT

MEN say the sullen instrument, That, from the Master's bow, With pangs of joy or woe,

Feels music's soul through every fibre sent,

Whispers the ravished strings

More than he knew or meant ;

Old summers in its memory glow;
The secrets of the wind it sings;
It hears the April-loosened springs;
And mixes with its mood

All it dreamed when it stood
In the murmurous pine-wood
Long ago!

The magical moonlight then

Steeped every bough and cone ; The roar of the brook in the glen

Came dim from the distance blown ; The wind through its glooms sang low, And it swayed to and fro With delight as it stood, In the wonderful wood, Long ago!

O my life, have we not had seasons
That only said, Live and rejoice?
That asked not for causes and reasons,
But made us all feeling and voice?
When we went with the winds in their
blowing,

When Nature and we were peers,
And we seemed to share in the flowing
Of the inexhaustible years?

Have we not from the earth drawn juices
Too fine for earth's sordid uses?
Have I heard, have I seen

All I feel, all I know?
Doth my heart overween?
Or could it have been
Long ago?

Sometimes a breath floats by me,
An odor from Dreamland sent,
That makes the ghost seem nigh me
Of a splendor that came and went,
Of a life lived somewhere, I know not
In what diviner sphere,
Of memories that stay not and go not,
Like music heard once by an ear

That cannot forget or reclaim it,
A something so shy, it would shame it
To make it a show,

A something too vague, could I name it,
For others to know,

As if I had lived it or dreamed it,
As if I had acted or schemed it,
Long ago!

THE WASHERS OF THE SHROUD OCTOBER, 1861

Lowell wrote at some length to C. E. Norton concerning the production of this poem.

ELMWOOD, Oct. 12, 1861.

... You urged me to read poetry - to feed myself on bee bread -so that I might get into the mood of writing some. Well, I have n't been reading any, but I have written something whether poetry or no I cannot tell yet. But I want you to like it if you can. Leigh Hunt speaks somewhere of our writing things for particular people, and wondering as we write if such or such a one will like it. Just so I thought of you, after I had written - for while I was writing I was wholly absorbed. I had just two days allowed me by Fields for the November Atlantic, and I got it done. It had been in my head some time, and when you see it you will remember my having spoken to you about it. Indeed, I owe it to you, for the hint came from one of those books of Souvestre's you lent me the Breton legends. The writing took hold of me enough to leave me tired out and to satisfy me entirely as to what was the original of my head and back pains. But whether it is good or not, I am not yet far enough off to say. But do like it, if you can. Fields says it is "splendid," with tears in his

eyes but then I read it to him, which is half the battle. I began it as a lyric, but it would be too aphoristic for that, and finally flatly refused to sing at any price. So I submitted, took to pentameters, and only hope the thoughts are good enough to be preserved in the ice of the colder and almost glacier-slow measure. I think I have done well-in some stanzas at least and not wasted words. It is about present matters - but abstract enough to be above the newspapers.

...

ALONG a river-side, I know not where,
I walked one night in mystery of dream;
A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my
hair,

To think what chanced me by the pallid

gleam

Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.